Category Archives: Progressive

I have no idea whether the 75,000 people who attended Obama’s rally in Portland, on the first warm Sunday after an unusually long and cold winter, were there to see him, to have fun on a nice day and flirt with all the other promiscuous liberals, or to see the free rock band. It was probably a combination of reasons. Someone who was there wrote:

I saw the crowd in my city. It was the single largest number of people I’ve ever seen. No doubt a few thousand came to see the 45 min rock band, but the other 70,000 came to see Obama. You ask anyone in the crowd why they came. It was free, the weather was perfect, and Obama was in town. Portland showed up for Obama when it counts in the end. May that never be forgotten. Portland is progressive–we don’t want to recycle old presidents, Clintons, and Bushes, for another 20 years!! Revolving dynasties turn rotten after a while.

I sympathize with the sentiment concerning the revolving dynasties in the Presidency. However there are more important things in the world than the last name of the candidates. Platform is one of them. The personal history and character of the candidate is another. Their skill at drawing rock-show sized crowds is secondary at best.

Anyway, before BO spoke there was a free concert by the Decemberists, an up-and-coming crypto-communist rock band from Portland. Rolling Stone loves them. Watch “O Valencia” for a taste of Tarantino-style paranoia from the band.

The juxtaposition of BO with Portland’s own Decemberists, who play the National Anthem of the Soviet Union before their concerts, is interesting enough, and also interesting in what it says about progressive Portland.

How can this be? The truth is that every change in the economy is good for someone and bad for someone else. Increased production, however, which Democrats and their Green buddies are against because of their irrational global warming obsession, lifts up everybody at the same time. What is the solution Soros proposes for the troubles he sees? More progressive and socialist agitation validated by the increasingly feckless(ref. meaning 2) Democratic Party, which he has bought and paid for with his billions. The only way to stop the dollar from plummeting is to stop printing so much money. This would require raising government interest rates and cutting government spending. In order for these changes to not plunge the US and world into a new depression, tax rates would also need to be reduced to minimal levels and bad rules and laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and the Americans with Disabilities act need to be repealed or drastically revised.

Being that we all live in “Christendom” — that is, a culture shaped and animated (in the literal sense of “given life”) by Judeo-Christian principles — I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that we share its underlying assumptions about the “brokenness” of man and the world. But where the progressive goes off the rails is in supposing there is some secret political formula that can reverse the fall and restore us to wholeness. Thus, the ubiquitous frenzied moral passion that always animates the left. Leftists are always exaggeratedly pessimistic about the present state of the world, but “optimistic” in a crazed and manic way that steamrules over anyone who would dare delay the immediate implementation of paradise.

From Marx on down, the leftist fallacy follows from turning spiritual Truth on its head (or “inside-out”), so that man’s spiritual crisis is seen as a material one (e.g. “robber barons,” “global warming,” “global cooling,” “nuclear power,” “income disparity,” “corporate greed,” etc.) instead of a psycho-spiritual one. This is the “fundamental assumption” which adherents of all the variant progressive systems within our epoch unconsciously presuppose.

For example, the progressive would say that Palestinians aren’t evil, they’re just poor. Which precisely inverts the truism that they are poor because they are evil (except for the few who are extraordinarily wealthy because they are evil, having been enriched by the largesse of Western progressives who give them money because they think it will stop them from being evil, when it always does the opposite, thus ensuring a constant cash flow from backward progressives).

When watching will.i.am’s newest video documentary of the personality cult around Obama I wonder if this will be seen as a pro-Obama video or an anti-Obama video in the long run. Watch it and see for yourself.

Donald Douglas notes that Edwards’ and Kucinich’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign leaves behind those Democrat candidates the nutroots most despised.

There’s been some recent commentary suggesting one of the biggest losers in primary season ’08 is the angry left.With top hard-left candidates John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich already out of the race, have the radical netroots Democratic Party activists sunk to irrelevancy?

Dan Gerstein made an interesting observation on this over the weekend, at the Wall Street Journal. He argues that while the Clinton-Obama South Carolina results appeared to resolve tensions over race and politics, the underlying significance of Obama’s victory was to relegate the Daily Kos angry hordes to the sidelines of the party

It would be a result most devoutly to be wished if the nutroots were to be revealed as the outside parenthesis of the left rather than the mainstream left. But as Douglas points out, even if this were to happen we can expect more Alinsky style troublemaking from the Kos/MoveOn/Soros demonizing hordes.

Kyle-Anne Shiver has been conducting a virtual seminar at the American Thinker for the past month or so in how Barack Obama and the Billary Clintons, who were all well trained in Saul Alinsky’s 4GW methods of agitation, have been employing the Alinsky techniques to destroy and defeat each other. The Alinsky technique is a vicious way of scapegoating and personally destroying a opponent in order to arouse and excite one’s own followers and demoralize and defeat the opponent’s followers.

Even though Obama seems to be harnessing the South Carolina black vote that will give him that state’s delegates, he has been feeling the brunt of the Clintons’ mastery of the tactic of polarization, taught decades ago to Hillary by Saul Alinsky.

Obama is being forced into the position of being the black candidate. Successfully polarizing Obama, who has attempted to run as the anti-polarity uniter, a man in the middle, has not been a lazy-day walk in the park for the Clintons, and surely would not have been attempted if Obama hadn’t trounced them in Iowa. [link]

Let me set something straight. I am a pragmatic anti-racist. I believe that race is a useless distinction. Race is a lie. There is no black race, no white race, no oriental race, no Jewish, Palestinian, English, French, Swedish, Aryan, German, Swiss, Russian, Ethiopian, Eritrean or Arab race. Caucasian, Mongolian, Negro are all long-rejected classifications of the human race based on the way that people look and the color of their skin. The human race is the only race worth favoring. Well, maybe wolves and other dogs deserve some favoring too.But black and white racism is about as stupid as white chocolate. Dark chocolate, on the other hand…

The Alinsky technique goes something like this. Find an opponent who has some reason to avoid open conflict. This opponent will become the scapegoat for all that is wrong in the world, the focus of agitation and polarization. Followers will come to believe this scapegoat is a vile enemy. It is not necessary that the scapegoat really be a vile enemy. They simply need to be able to be painted as an enemy.

Ridicule the enemy. Then blame the enemy for whatever the enemy has. It doesn’t have to be anything bad. It only has to be something you don’t have. Start making a lot of noise. Be rude, horrible, hateful. This isn’t about truth or reality, it is about turning your followers into mad dogs and frightening the enemy and any innocent bystanders into letting you get away with whatever you want to do.

Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on the tactics of Saul Alinsky. She was offered a job to work directly for Alinsky in Chicago, but turned it down to go to law school at Yale, where she worked to defend Black Panthers from murder charges. She understands Alinsky’s method very well. After graduating, Obama went to work for a community organization in Chicago that needed a black person to rabble rouse in the hood. They used the Alinsky method to agitate for free goodies for the “Have Nots.” Obama learned by doing and became very good at it. He got good enough that it led to his first political office as a ward politician in Chicago.

Obama does not want to engage in verbal combat with Hillary Clinton because no man should fight a woman. Mrs. Clinton already complained that the men were beating up on helpless poor little rich-girl Hill at an early debate. Obama knows that beating up a girl is a losing tactic. Instead, he has been direct about publicly scapegoating Bill Clinton as the problem with the hostility in the campaign. He will not do the same to Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps he will find some subordinates to do the dirty work of tarring her. If he wants to have a chance he will.

Obama is as likable as Bill Clinton. He doesn’t need to get into the mud to fight it out. He could win without using Alinsky tactics. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is not charismatic. She needs to use Alinsky-style tactics. If you thought the Bill Clinton years were divisive and polarizing for the country, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Following the successful example of the Clintons, the Democrats divide the country up into tribes of women, blacks, hispanics, gays and lesbians, abortionists, leftover marxists, good and bad members of the military, good and bad businessmen, tobacco-spitting hicks, NASCAR voters, and the like. If they can assemble enough tribes into their coalition they can win. They do not have any interest in bringing people together or in erasing tribal distinctions. They succeed when they polarize people and drive them into tribes, because that makes the tribes angry and easy to manipulate with Alinsky-style tactics.

So what are the Billary Clintons doing against Obama? They are turning his black support against him. He is not running on race, but black people support him anyway. The Clintons will force him to stand with his race while Hillary gathers women to herself, and in a vote along tribal lines the 50% woman vote beats the 10% black vote. They will also ridicule his lack of experience, as he is only a first term Senator, while touting Hillary Clinton’s experience.

This leaves an opening the Republican opponent can use in the general election. Ultra-feminist Hillary Clinton is counting being the long-suffering wife of a philandering President as experience leading the country. It isn’t, no matter how much she cries about it. She is only a second-term Senator and never held any elected office before joining the Senate. Plus she is older than Bill by a year. Perhaps she will cry in her defense again. Perhaps? Surely she will.

The presidential campaign is going to get really ugly. Uglier than we have ever seen it. And that ugliness will be something that can be turned against those who use it.

People believe some pretty strange things based on their prejudices. A commenter claimed that most abortions are done by white teenagers whose parents pay for it (spoiled white anglos was his term). This prompted me to analyze the numbers myself.

I found useful sources for some of this data at Kaiser Family’s statehealthfacts.org. Note their statistics are weird because they are based on statistics reported by the states. California does not report on the number of abortions performed, though it had been responsible for 23% of the abortions performed in the USA before 1998, when it stopped reporting. Yet if it were to be added back in, California alone would increase the number of abortions performed by 23%, or almost 200,000. One wonders what caused famously Democrat-dominated California to stop reporting the number of abortions performed there.

Update: Correction, adding California back in would increase the number of abortions by about 30%, or 250,000.

Agewise, 17% of all abortions involve a mother up to the age of 19. 56% involve a mother between the ages of 20 and 29, and 23% are between 30 and 39. Racewise, 53% of abortive mothers are white, 35% are black, and 13% are other or unknown. Taking 53% of 17% shows that roughly 9% of abortive mothers are white teens. 9% is not a majority.

Let’s look at this further. According to the US census data, 13% of Americans are black. If 35% of abortions are on behalf of 13% of the populace then abortions are disproprionately affecting that 13%. Let’s see how it works by analyzing abortions as a percentage of live births by race. In 2004, 4.112 Million children were born. 2.296 Million were white. .578 Million were black. Also in 2004, .839 Million children were aborted, 53% by white mothers, 35% by black mothers.

Working out the numbers, the proportion of abortions compared to live births overall is 20.4%. Of white mothers, it is 19.37%. Of black mothers, it is 50.8%. Half as many viable black children are killed before they can be born as get the chance to live. This calculation does not include miscarriages, which are fairly common. But the result falling out of Kaiser’s data, reported from the states, is that one out of three viable pregnancies among black women ends in abortion and one out of six viable pregnancies among white women ends the same way.

In the US, 69% of all abortions are performed at 441 abortion clinics. 89 out of 320 metropolitan areas and 86% of all counties (the rural ones) in the USA have no abortion providers, leaving about 230 metropolitan areas with at least one abortion clinic each. Who lives there? The women who live nearby, those are the women who are being encouraged, far out of proportion, to abort their children instead of giving birth to them. Reminder, only 17% of these women are teens. The vast majority of these women are grown women.

In the 41 areas for which race was adequately reported, approximately 55% of women who obtained legal induced abortions were known to be white, 35% were black, and 7% were of other races; for 3% of the women, race was unknown. (Table 9). The abortion ratio for black women (503 per 1,000 live births) was 3.0 times the ratio for white women (167 per 1,000 live births). Additionally, the abortion ratio for women of other races (329 per 1,000 live births) was 2.0 times the ratio for white women. The abortion rate for black women (30 per 1,000 women) was 3.1 times the rate for white women (10 per 1,000 women), whereas the abortion rate for women of other races (22 per 1,000 women) was 2.2 times the rate for white women.

The question that comes to my mind is how is this not a massive, publicly financed program of defacto extermination aimed at black and minority children?

Who is responsible for killing black children like this? They are NARAL, Planned Parenthood and the Democratic party, who have supported the progressive principle of eugenics by encouraging the abortion of black babies ever since the time of Margaret Sanger.

Even leftist-feminist Julianne Malveaux admits that Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, was at best a eugenicist and at worst a racist who favored a reduction in the black birth rate.

In a 1921 article in the Birth Control Review, Sanger wrote, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” Reviewers of one of her 1919 articles interpreted her objectives as “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.” Again, the question of who decides fitness is important, and it was an issue that Sanger only partly addressed. “The undeniably feebleminded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind,” she wrote.

Sanger advocated the mandatory sterilization of the “insane and feebleminded.” Although this does not diminish her legacy as the key force in the birth control movement, it raises questions much like those now being raised about our nation’s slaveholding founders. How do we judge historical figures? How are their contributions placed in context?

It is easy to see why there is some antipathy toward Sanger among people of color, considering that, given our nation’s history, we are the people most frequently described as “unfit” and “feebleminded.”

Summing up, 1 out of 3 black babies are aborted before being born. This has been going on since 1972, for a total death toll of 14 Million black babies. If only the same proportion of black babies had been aborted as all babies, there would be 8.4 Million more black people in the US, for an increase of 23% in the number of black people in the US. If a racist who hated black people wanted to kill as many off as possible, then he or she could do no better than voting Democrat. Legal abortion has killed just about one out of five black Americans before they even got the chance to live their lives. Not even the KKK ever approached numbers of that magnitude.